Your point about "doing the right thing" is a complete logical fallacy. Are you implying that group A is somehow more deserving that group B?
Don't forget - the "tech giants" you refer to are comprised of people, most of whom have jobs and families
This isn't about whims of tech giants - more about whims of the market.
If the pitchfork-waving masses on HN screaming about Revolv had all actually, well, bought a Revolv, I suspect the company wouldn't have gone bust. The fact of the matter is - the market (or we) spoke - we didn't like Revolv, and that was the reason they failed in the marketplace.
I don't think Nest made any secret of it - as soon as they bought out Revolv, they announced it quite publicly on their blog - we are stopping all sales of this product, immediately - but we will continue to support it for some time.
This was no deep conspiracy - it was, well, the product's a wash, we're buying out the company, and keeping the team.
Think about it - they probably still had stock of the product lying around at the time - they would rather just destroy those than sell them - what does that tell you about the product?
There were heaps of pundits at the time who speculated on why Revolv failed.
I think that's a far more worthy topic of discussion (i.e lessons learned on why it didn't gain traction), than going on about why we're not supporting a failed product from 2 years ago.
I don't think you know what a logical fallacy is. Which one did I commit? Calm down, please. I am not "waving a pitchfork". I didn't own a Reolv, I don't have a horse in this race.
However, I do think that there's a valid discussion to be had over the fate of a device that's integrated to the point a "home automation hub" is. The normal expectation is that these devices continue to work for the life of the device, not when some company throws a switch somewhere.
The problem here is that there's no alternative. No graceful degradation. If Ecobee dies tomorrow, I still have a working thermostat.
This? None. Your device is now literally and figuratively worthless, the money you spent on it literally wasted. Were I a purchaser of one of these things, I'd be feeling damn scandalized, ripped off, and rightly so.
Revolv was sold as a cloud-managed device - the thousand or so people who bought one knew this.
This isn't a unique problem just to Revolv, or home automation.
What happens when any company that provides a SaaS or cloud service goes bust?
Say you host your app on AWS, or DigitalOcean - if the company shuts down, will you claim that it's not "fair" for them to shutdown on you, and they must keep your application running?
Tech companies shut down all the time - sure, it sucks both for the people that work at that company, and for their customers (but I suspect more for the employees - you may have just lost some expensive tech toy - they've potentially lost their livelihoods.)
Let's take a step back, and look objectively at the facts - there was a small hardware startup, that created a cloud-based home automation product.
A few thousand people probably bought it - not enough to keep the company going. They were acqui-hired, all remaining stock destroyed, but the company that acquired the team decided to keep the servers up for a couple more years. After that, they announced they were pulling the plug.
Sure, it sucks - but they bought a cloud-managed product from a new hardware startup. I don't think any of these people were stupid - they knew exactly what they were buying.
If they didn't want to have this risk, then they would have bought from either 1. a larger company that was less likely to go bust or 2. a non-cloud managed product.
However, many of the advantages of the product are probably from it being cloud-managed. I see no issue with buying a cloud-managed device, as long as you know what you're getting into.
And look - let's be honest - home automation - I don't exactly want to be opening up my home network to the world, just so I can access it from my phone. Having a hosted service to do this is pretty cool.
Likewise, I don't have the compute power to do any cool ML at home - but if it was all done on the cloud, and there was a company behind it with the infrastructure and engineering effort, that's a good thing.
I have two Dropcams - they're pretty cool devices. Very easy to setup - but cloud managed. This is tradeoff I knew when I bought them. If the company disappeared, I understand my cameras would fail to work.
I would be upset - but I don't think it would be "unfair". I'd just hope that the people who worked at the company were doing alright.
The average person probably doesn't even know what "the cloud" is beyond the name of a product or two. They know that they can push a button their phone and turn the lights off.
You imply a level of knowing and care that most people do not have, and so one that is not realistic, or reasonable to expect.
No, that's literally exactly the story in question. What if this is the Google answer for hardware going forward? Buy what you're interested in before it's ready, give us signal about what's good/bad, and if we kill it we pay you back what it cost.
Don't forget - the "tech giants" you refer to are comprised of people, most of whom have jobs and families
This isn't about whims of tech giants - more about whims of the market.
If the pitchfork-waving masses on HN screaming about Revolv had all actually, well, bought a Revolv, I suspect the company wouldn't have gone bust. The fact of the matter is - the market (or we) spoke - we didn't like Revolv, and that was the reason they failed in the marketplace.
I don't think Nest made any secret of it - as soon as they bought out Revolv, they announced it quite publicly on their blog - we are stopping all sales of this product, immediately - but we will continue to support it for some time.
This was no deep conspiracy - it was, well, the product's a wash, we're buying out the company, and keeping the team.
Think about it - they probably still had stock of the product lying around at the time - they would rather just destroy those than sell them - what does that tell you about the product?
http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/24/7061557/nest-acquires-rev.... http://www.cepro.com/article/theories_on_home_automation_hub....
There were heaps of pundits at the time who speculated on why Revolv failed.
I think that's a far more worthy topic of discussion (i.e lessons learned on why it didn't gain traction), than going on about why we're not supporting a failed product from 2 years ago.